Veil of Night takes Vampire: The Dark Ages out of its usual medieval European setting and into an equally important culture opposed to Christendom at the time, the Islamic world.
Veil of Night is a hardback setting sourcebook for Vampire: The Dark Ages, equivalent in size and ambition to Mummy: The Resurrection or Wraith: The Great War. It is a new setting for an existing game, everything you need to run a chronicle except for core rules.
The release of Veil of Night shows Vampire: The Dark Ages to be a significant success, because when it was originally released there was a widely-held view that Dark Ages should have been a sourcebook such as this rather than a full game in its own right.
Unlike comparable books such as Wraith: The Great War or Kindred Of The East, Veil of Night does not concern a separate historical era from the main game, nor a new variety of player character. Rather, it centres on a different culture of the same supernatural creature, vampires, at the same time, the late Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries. It is only the difference in culture and a few hundred miles of geography that separates these vampires from the European Cainites that are the protagonists of Vampire: The Dark Ages. Therefore, Veil of Night can be used as a guidebook to Dark Ages chronicles visiting the Middle East, but the sheer depth of material here encourages a different use, as a setting for new stories based heavily or entirely in the Islamic world.
After a thorough preface including scene-setting fiction and a brief legend of the first vampire to convert to Islam, there is a solid introduction to Islamic history with the addition of vampires, a good section on the geography of the Middle East, and enough information to create Muslim player characters and NPCs. This has to be used in concert with the Dark Ages rulebook, and the Dark Ages Companion would be helpful as well, for its additional and optional rules for character creation and especially its coverage of an African bloodline here included in the description of the clans but without repeating the data on their signature power. It would also be quite possible to run a Veil of Night game with Vampire: The Masquerade.
Since there is no significant tradition of vampire legends in the Islamic world, Veil of Night characters are cultural variations on the European Cainites found in Dark Ages. Muslim vampires have organised into a loose coalition called the Ashirra, and those of other beliefs (such as the immortals older than this new religion, often including the displeased sires of Ashirra vampires) who seek to avoid conflict with the faithful.
Following the character creation section are rules for additional powers such as Islamic blood magic (the Tremere, a clan of magic-using vampires who were wizards in life, are not present in the Muslim world to any significant degree), equipment and its uses (horse archers were more common in the Islamic armies than the Christian crusaders they fought, for example), and “systems for life and unlife” dealing with practicalities such as consecrating blood (blood is unclean in Islam, and some Muslim vampires need to cleanse it before they feel comfortable imbibing) and hiding bodies, and finally a section on True Faith, the religious belief that the undead find painful and frightening, and which is quite common in the heart of Islam.
After this rules section comes Damascus by Night, a sample setting given enough detail to base a chronicle on in twenty-two pages, and an appendix concerning the assorted other supernatural beings of the Middle East, from mortal hunters to Djinn, with sidebars for sample characters and advice. The last text in the book is a sidebar answering the question of whether a Djinn’s wishes can cure the curse of vampirism, a great concern to Muslim vampires who struggle against the agony and terror of approaching the holy places of their religion, as well as to many others among the undead.
Veil of Night maintains the excellent standards of research for the Dark Ages line. There is a substantial lexicon complete with notes on pronunciation and the difficulties of translation from a different alphabet, a good section of resources from Cambridge University Press to educational websites, and the sections on geography and history are lengthy. Of course, it is a game resource rather than a cultural studies textbook, so the majority of this data is of obvious use in games, and most of the book is devoted to the setting’s vampires, and the creation of games featuring them.
Stylistically, the book is generally fine. It contains many pleasing little touches. The authors are credited for the specific sections they worked on, for example, a policy I recommend. The quality of art varies somewhat – Guy Davis’s scratchy but atmospheric sketches contrast with the extremely angular black and white pictures of Mike Chaney (I believe – he does not sign his work) reminiscent of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. Rik Martin’s clan illustrations are well executed and realistic, portraits of people which lack the stereotypical appearance of the different human-seeming clans. Brian LeBlanc’s expressive, exaggerated characters always seemed to me to fit Werewolf more than Vampire, and his frontispieces include a gratuitous vampire harem illustration as well as the clever use of the hideous Nosferatu vampires in common Middle-Eastern activities.
Veil of Night is, along with Mummy: The Resurrection and the forthcoming Cairo by Night for Vampire: The Masquerade, one of the flagship books in White Wolf’s Year of the Scarab series, but unlike the others this seems a stretch on the format. Egypt is given little coverage, and while the evil Egyptian clan, the Followers of Set, are a more natural part of this setting than the main European location of Dark Ages, they are covered elsewhere, in their Clanbook for Masquerade and in Libellus Sanguinus 3 for Dark Ages. However, if an inaccurate Year Of label means Veil of Night is released, I don’t really mind.
In all, Veil of Night covers it subject matter very thoroughly and effectively, and encourages this reader to consider it as the basis of games. As a sourcebook, then, it succeeds admirably.
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